Title: The Phoenix on the Sword
Author: Robert E. Howard
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0600811h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: May 2006
Most recent update: November 2015
This eBook was produced by Richard Scott and Colin Choat,
and updated by Roy Glashan.
Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.
This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html
To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

The Phoenix on the Sword

by

Robert E. Howard

First published in Weird Tales, December 1932

TABLE OF CONTENTS

"KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans
drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons
of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread
across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir,
Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of
spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the
pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose
riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world
was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the
Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen- eyed,sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a
slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled
thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."—The Nemedian
Chronicles

OVER shadowy spire's and gleaming towers lay the ghostly
darkness and silence that runs before dawn. Into a dim alley, one of a
veritable labyrinth of mysterious winding ways, four masked figures came
hurriedly from a door which a dusky hand furtively opened. They spoke not but
went swiftly into the gloom, cloaks wrapped closely about them; as silently
as the ghosts of murdered men they disappeared in the darkness. Behind them a
sardonic countenance was framed in the partly opened door; a pair of evil
eyes glittered malevolently in the gloom.

"Go into the night, creatures of the night," a voice mocked. "Oh, fools,
your doom hounds your heels like a blind dog, and you know it not." The
speaker closed the door and bolted it, then turned and went up the corridor,
candle in hand. He was a somber giant, whose dusky skin revealed his Stygian
blood. He came into an inner chamber, where a tall, lean man in worn velvet
lounged like a great lazy cat on a silken couch, sipping wine from a huge
golden goblet.

"Well, Ascalante," said the Stygian, setting down the candle, "your dupes
have slunk into the streets like rats from their burrows. You work with
strange tools."

"Tools?" replied Ascalante. "Why, they consider me that. For months now,
ever since the Rebel Four summoned me from the southern desert, I have been
living in the very heart of my enemies, hiding by day in this obscure house,
skulking through dark alleys and darker corridors at night. And I have
accomplished what those rebellious nobles could not. Working through them,
and through other agents, many of whom have never seen my face, I have
honeycombed the empire with sedition and unrest. In short I, working in the
shadows, have paved the downfall of the king who sits throned in the sun. By
Mitra, I was a statesman before I was an outlaw."

"And these dupes who deem themselves your masters?"

"They will continue to think that I serve them, until our present task is
completed. Who are they to match wits with Ascalante? Volmana, the dwarfish
count of Karaban; Gromel, the giant commander of the Black Legion; Dion, the
fat baron of Attalus; Rinaldo, the hare-brained minstrel. I am the force
which has welded together the steel in each, and by the clay in each, I will
crush them when the time comes. But that lies in the future; tonight the king
dies."

"Days ago I saw the imperial squadrons ride from the city," said the
Stygian. "They rode to the frontier which the heathen Picts assail –
thanks to the strong liquor which I've smuggled over the borders to madden
them. Dion's great wealth made that possible. And Volmana made it possible to
dispose of the rest of the imperial troops which remained in the city.
Through his princely kin in Nemedia, it was easy to persuade King Numa to
request the presence of Count Trocero of Poitain, seneschal of Aquilonia; and
of course, to do him honor, he'll be accompanied by an imperial escort, as
well as his own troops, and Prospero, King Conan's right-hand man. That
leaves only the king's personal bodyguard in the city—beside the Black
Legion. Through Gromel I've corrupted a spendthrift officer of that guard,
and bribed him to lead his men away from the king's door at midnight.

"Then, with sixteen desperate rogues of mine, we enter the palace by a
secret tunnel. After the deed is done, even if the people do not rise to
welcome us, Gromel's Black Legion will be sufficient to hold the city and the
crown."

"And Dion thinks that crown will be given to him?"

"Yes. The fat fool claims it by reason of a trace of royal blood. Conan
makes a bad mistake in letting men live who still boast descent from the old
dynasty, from which he tore the crown of Aquilonia.

"Volmana wishes to be reinstated in royal favor as he was under the old
regime, so that he may lift his poverty-ridden estates to their former
grandeur. Gromel hates Pallantides, commander of the Black Dragons, and
desires the command of the whole army, with all the stubbornness of the
Bossonian. Alone of us all, Rinaldo has no personal ambition. He sees in
Conan a red- handed, rough-footed barbarian who came out of the north to
plunder a civilized land. He idealizes the king whom Conan killed to get the
crown, remembering only that he occasionally patronized the arts, and
forgetting the evils of his reign, and he is making the people forget.
Already they openly sing The Lament for the King in which Rinaldo
lauds the sainted villain and denounces Conan as 'that black-hearted savage
from the abyss.' Conan laughs, but the people snarl."

"Why does he hate Conan?"

"Poets always hate those in power. To them perfection is always just
behind the last corner, or beyond the next. They escape the present in dreams
of the past and future. Rinaldo is a flaming torch of idealism, rising, as he
thinks, to overthrow a tyrant and liberate the people. As for me—well,
a few months ago I had lost all ambition but to raid the caravans for the
rest of my life; now old dreams stir. Conan will die; Dion will mount the
throne. Then he, too, will die. One by one, all who oppose me will
die—by fire, or steel, or those deadly wines you know so well how to
brew. Ascalante, king of Aquilonia! How like you the sound of it?"

The Stygian shrugged his broad shoulders.

"There was a time," he said with unconcealed bitterness, "when I, too, had
my ambitions, beside which yours seem tawdry and childish. To what a state I
have fallen! My old-time peers and rivals would stare indeed could they see
Thoth-amon of the Ring serving as the slave of an outlander, and an outlaw at
that; and aiding in the petty ambitions of barons and kings!"

"Wits and swords are as straws against the wisdom of the Darkness,"
growled the Stygian, his dark eyes flickering with menacing lights and
shadows. "Had I not lost the Ring, our positions might be reversed."

"Nevertheless," answered the outlaw impatiently, "you wear the stripes of
my whip on your back, and are likely to continue to wear them."

"Be not so sure!" the fiendish hatred of the Stygian glittered for an
instant redly in his eyes. "Some day, somehow, I will find the Ring again,
and when I do, by the serpent-fangs of Set, you shall pay—"

The hot-tempered Aquilonian started up and struck him heavily across the
mouth. Thoth reeled back, blood starting from his lips.

"You grow over-bold, dog," growled the outlaw. "Have a care; I am still
your master who knows your dark secret. Go upon the housetops and shout that
Ascalante is in the city plotting against the king—if you dare."

"I dare not," muttered the Stygian, wiping the blood from his lips.

"No, you do not dare," Ascalante grinned bleakly. "For if I die by your
stealth or treachery, a hermit priest in the southern desert will know of it,
and will break the seal of a manuscript I left in his hands. And having read,
a word will be whispered in Stygia, and a wind will creep up from the south
by midnight. And where will you hide your head, Thoth-amon?"

The slave shuddered and his dusky face went ashen.

"Enough!" Ascalante changed his tone peremptorily. "I have work for you. I
do not trust Dion. I bade him ride to his country estate and remain there
until the work tonight is done. The fat fool could never conceal his
nervousness before the king today. Ride after him, and if you do not overtake
him on the road, proceed to his estate and remain with him until we send for
him. Don't let him out of your sight. He is mazed with fear, and might bolt
– might even rush to Conan in a panic, and reveal the whole plot,
hoping thus to save his own hide. Go!"

The slave bowed, hiding the hate in his eyes, and did as he was bidden.
Ascalante turned again to his wine. Over the jeweled spires was rising a dawn
crimson as blood.

When I was a fighting-man,
the kettle-drums they beat;
The people scattered gold-dust before my horse's feet;
But now I am a great king, the people hound my track
With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.
—The Road of Kings

THE ROOM was large and ornate, with rich tapestries on the
polished panelled walls, deep rugs on the ivory floor, and with the lofty
ceiling adorned with intricate carvings and silver scrollwork. Behind an
ivory, gold- inlaid writing-table sat a man whose broad shoulders and
sun-browned skin seemed out of place among those luxuriant surroundings. He
seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands. His
slightest movement spoke of steel-spring muscles knit to a keen brain with
the co-ordination of a born fighting-man. There was nothing deliberate or
measured about his actions. Either he was perfectly at rest—still as a
bronze statue—or else he was in motion, not with the jerky quickness of
over-tense nerves, but with a cat-like speed that blurred the sight which
tried to follow him.

His garments were of rich fabric, but simply made. He wore no ring or
ornaments, and his square-cut black mane was confined merely by a cloth-of-
silver band about his head.

Now he laid down the golden stylus with which he had been laboriously
scrawling on waxed papyrus, rested his chin on his fist, and fixed his
smoldering blue eyes enviously on the man who stood before him. This person
was occupied in his own affairs at the moment, for he was taking up the laces
of his gold-chased armor, and abstractedly whistling—a rather
unconventional performance, considering that he was in the presence of a
king.

"Prospero," said the man at the table, "these matters of statecraft weary
me as all the fighting I have done never did."

"All part of the game, Conan," answered the dark-eyed Poitainian. "You are
king—you must play the part."

"I wish I might ride with you to Nemedia," said Conan enviously. "It seems
ages since I had a horse between my knees—but Publius says that affairs
in the city require my presence. Curse him!

"When I overthrew the old dynasty," he continued, speaking with the easy
familiarity which existed only between the Poitainian and himself, "it was
easy enough, though it seemed bitter hard at the time. Looking back now over
the wild path I followed, all those days of toil, intrigue, slaughter and
tribulation seem like a dream.

"I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my
feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had
reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the
crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword
and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is
useless.

"When I overthrew Numedides, then I was the Liberator—now they spit
at my shadow. They have put a statue of that swine in the temple of Mitra,
and people go and wail before it, hailing it as the holy effigy of a saintly
monarch who was done to death by a red-handed barbarian. When I led her
armies to victory as a mercenary, Aquilonia overlooked the fact that I was a
foreigner, but now she can not forgive me.

"Now in Mitra's temple there come to burn incense to Numedides' memory,
men whom his hangmen maimed and blinded, men whose sons died in his dungeons,
whose wives and daughters were dragged into his seraglio. The fickle
fools!"

"Rinaldo is largely responsible," answered Prospero, drawing up his sword-
belt another notch. "He sings songs that make men mad. Hang him in his
jester's garb to the highest tower in the city. Let him make rimes for the
vultures."

Conan shook his lion head. "No, Prospero, he's beyond my reach. A great
poet is greater than any king. His songs are mightier than my scepter; for he
has near ripped the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I
shall die and be forgotten, but Rinaldo's songs will live for ever.

"No, Prospero," the king continued, a somber look of doubt shadowing his
eyes, "there is something hidden, some undercurrent of which we are not
aware. I sense it as in my youth I sensed the tiger hidden in the tall grass.
There is a nameless unrest throughout the kingdom. I am like a hunter who
crouches by his small fire amid the forest, and hears stealthy feet padding
in the darkness, and almost sees the glimmer of burning eyes. If I could but
come to grips with something tangible, that I could cleave with my sword! I
tell you, it's not by chance that the Picts have of late so fiercely assailed
the frontiers, so that the Bossonians have called for aid to beat them back.
I should have ridden with the troops."

"Publius feared a plot to trap and slay you beyond the frontier," replied
Prospero, smoothing his silken surcoat over his shining mail, and admiring
his tall lithe figure in a silver mirror. "That's why he urged you to remain
in the city. These doubts are born of your barbarian instincts. Let the
people snarl! The mercenaries are ours, and the Black Dragons, and every
rogue in Poitain swears by you. Your only danger is assassination, and that's
impossible, with men of the imperial troops guarding you day and night. What
are you working at there?"

"A map," Conan answered with pride. "The maps of the court show well the
countries of south, east and west, but in the north they are vague and
faulty. I am adding the northern lands myself. Here is Cimmeria, where I was
born. And —"

"Asgard and Vanaheim," Prospero scanned the map. "By Mitra, I had almost
believed those countries to have been fabulous."

Conan grinned savagely, involuntarily touching the scars on his dark face.
"You had known otherwise, had you spent your youth on the northern frontiers
of Cimmeria! Asgard lies to the north, and Vanaheim to the northwest of
Cimmeria, and there is continual war along the borders."

"What manner of men are these northern folk?" asked Prospero.

"Tall and fair and blue-eyed. Their god is Ymir, the frost-giant, and each
tribe has its own king. They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and
drink ale and roar their wild songs all night."

"Then I think you are like them," laughed Prospero. "You laugh greatly,
drink deep and bellow good songs; though I never saw another Cimmerian who
drank aught but water, or who ever laughed, or ever sang save to chant dismal
dirges."

"Perhaps it's the land they live in," answered the king. "A gloomier land
never was—all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray,
with winds moaning drearily down the valleys."

"Little wonder men grow moody there," quoth Prospero with a shrug of his
shoulders, thinking of the smiling sun-washed plains and blue lazy rivers of
Poitain, Aquilonia's southernmost province.

"They have no hope here or hereafter," answered Conan. "Their gods are
Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist,
which is the world of the dead. Mitra! The ways of the Aesir were more to my
liking."

"Well," grinned Prospero, "the dark hills of Cimmeria are far behind you.
And now I go. I'll quaff a goblet of white Nemedian wine for you at Numa's
court."

Under the caverned pyramids
great Set coils asleep;
Among the shadows of the tombs his dusky people creep.
I speak the Word from the hidden gulfs that never knew the sun—
Send me a servant for my hate, oh scaled and shining One.

THE SUN was setting, etching the green and hazy blue of the
forest in brief gold. The waning beams glinted on the thick golden chain
which Dion of Attalus twisted continually in his pudgy hand as he sat in the
flaming riot of blossoms and flowering trees which was his garden. He shifted
his fat body on his marble seat and glanced furtively about, as if in quest
of a lurking enemy. He sat within a circular grove of slender trees, whose
interlapping branches cast a thick shade over him. Near at hand a fountain
tinkled silverly, and other unseen fountains in various parts of the great
garden whispered an everlasting symphony.

Dion was alone except for the great dusky figure which lounged on a marble
bench close at hand, watching the baron with deep somber eyes. Dion gave
little thought to Thoth-amon. He vaguely knew that he was a slave in whom
Ascalante reposed much trust, but like so many rich men, Dion paid scant heed
to men below his own station in life.

"You need not be so nervous," said Thoth. "The plot can not fail."

"Ascalante can make mistakes as well as another," snapped Dion, sweating
at the mere thought of failure.

"Not he," grinned the Stygian savagely, "else I had not been his slave,
but his master. "

"What talk is this?" peevishly returned Dion, with only half a mind on the
conversation.

Thoth-amon's eyes narrowed. For all his iron self-control, he was near
bursting with long pent-up shame, hate and rage, ready to take any sort of a
desperate chance. What he did not reckon on was the fact that Dion saw him,
not as a human being with a brain and a wit, but simply a slave, and as such,
a creature beneath notice.

"Listen to me," said Thoth. "You will be king. But you little know the
mind of Ascalante. You can not trust him, once Conan is slain. I can help
you. If you will protect me when you come to power, I will aid you.

"Listen, my lord. I was a great sorcerer in the south. Men spoke of
Thoth-Amon as they spoke of Rammon. King Ctesphon of Stygia gave me great
honor, casting down the magicians from the high places to exalt me above
them. They hated me, but they feared me, for I controlled beings from outside
which came at my call and did my bidding. By Set, mine enemy knew not the
hour when he might awake at midnight to feel the taloned fingers of a
nameless horror at his throat! I did dark and terrible magic with the Serpent
Ring of Set, which I found in a nighted tomb a league beneath the earth,
forgotten before the first man crawled out of the slimy sea.

"But a thief stole the Ring and my power was broken. The magicians rose up
to slay me, and I fled. Disguised as a camel-driver, I was travelling in a
caravan in the land of Koth, when Ascalante's reavers fell upon us. All in
the caravan were slain except myself; I saved my life by revealing my
identity to Ascalante and swearing to serve him. Bitter has been that
bondage!

"To hold me fast, he wrote of me in a manuscript, and sealed it and gave
it into the hands of a hermit who dwells on the southern borders of Koth. I
dare not strike a dagger into him while he sleeps, or betray him to his
enemies, for then the hermit would open the manuscript and read—thus
Ascalante instructed him. And he would speak a word in Stygia—"

Again Thoth shuddered and an ashen hue tinged his dusky skin.

"Men knew me not in Aquilonia," he said. "But should my enemies in Stygia
learn my whereabouts, not the width of half a world between us would suffice
to save me from such a doom as would blast the soul of a bronze statue. Only
a king with castles and hosts of swordsmen could protect me. So I have told
you my secret, and urge that you make a pact with me. I can aid you with my
wisdom, and you can protect me. And some day I will find the Ring—"

"Ring? Ring?" Thoth had underestimated the man's utter egoism. Dion had
not even been listening to the slave's words, so completely engrossed was he
in his own thoughts, but the final word stirred a ripple in his self-
centeredness.

"Ring?" he repeated. "That makes me remember—my ring of good
fortune. I had it from a Shemitish thief who swore he stole it from a wizard
far to the south, and that it would bring me luck. I paid him enough, Mitra
knows. By the gods, I need all the luck I can have, what with Volmana and
Ascalante dragging me into their bloody plots—I'll see to the
ring."

Thoth sprang up, blood mounting darkly to his face, while his eyes flamed
with the stunned fury of a man who suddenly realizes the full depths of a
fool's swinish stupidity. Dion never heeded him. Lifting a secret lid in the
marble seat, he fumbled for a moment among a heap of gewgaws of various kinds
– barbaric charms, bits of bones, pieces of tawdry jewelry—luck-
pieces and conjures which the man's superstitious nature had prompted him to
collect.

"Ah, here it is!" He triumphantly lifted a ring of curious make. It was of
a metal like copper, and was made in the form of a scaled serpent, coiled in
three loops, with its tail in its mouth. Its eyes were yellow gems which
glittered balefully. Thoth-amon cried out as if he had been struck, and Dion
wheeled and gaped, his face suddenly bloodless. The slave's eyes were
blazing, his mouth wide, his huge dusky hands outstretched like talons.

"The Ring! By Set! The Ring!" he shrieked. "My Ring—stolen from
me—" Steel glittered in the Stygian's hand and with a heave of his
great dusky shoulders he drove the dagger into the baron's fat body. Dion's
high thin squeal broke in a strangled gurgle and his whole flabby frame
collapsed like melted butter. A fool to the end, he died in mad terror, not
knowing why. Flinging aside the crumpled corpse, already forgetful of it,
Thoth grasped the ring in both hands, his dark eyes blazing with a fearful
avidness.

"My Ring!" he whispered in terrible exultation. "My power!"

How long he crouched over the baleful thing, motionless as a statue,
drinking the evil aura of it into his dark soul, not even the Stygian knew.
When he shook himself from his revery and drew back his mind from the nighted
abysses where it had been questing, the moon was rising, casting long shadows
across the smooth marble back of the garden-seat, at the foot of which
sprawled the darker shadow which had been the lord of Attalus.

"No more, Ascalante, no more!" whispered the Stygian, and his eyes burned
red as a vampire's in the gloom. Stooping, he cupped a handful of congealing
blood from the sluggish pool in which his victim sprawled, and rubbed it in
the copper serpent's eyes until the yellow sparks were covered by a crimson
mask.

"Blind your eyes, mystic serpent," he chanted in a blood-freezing whisper.
"Blind your eyes to the moonlight and open them on darker gulfs! What do you
see, oh serpent of Set? Whom do you call from the gulfs of the Night? Whose
shadow falls on the waning Light? Call him to me, oh serpent of Set!"

Stroking the scales with a peculiar circular motion of his fingers, a
motion which always carried the fingers back to their starting place, his
voice sank still lower as he whispered dark names and grisly incantations
forgotten the world over save in the grim hinterlands of dark Stygia, where
monstrous shapes move in the dusk of the tombs.

There was a movement in the air about him, such a swirl as is made in
water when some creature rises to the surface. A nameless, freezing wind blew
on him briefly, as if from an opened Door. Thoth felt a presence at his back,
but he did not look about. He kept his eyes fixed on the moonlit space of
marble, on which a tenuous shadow hovered. As he continued his whispered
incantations, this shadow grew in size and clarity, until it stood out
distinct and horrific. Its outline was not unlike that of a gigantic baboon,
but no such baboon ever walked the earth, not even in Stygia. Still Thoth did
not look, but drawing from his girdle a sandal of his master—always
carried in the dim hope that he might be able to put it to such use—he
cast it behind him.

"Know it well, slave of the Ring!" he exclaimed. "Find him who wore it and
destroy him! Look into his eyes and blast his soul, before you tear out his
throat! Kill him! Aye," in a blind burst of passion, "and all with him!"

Etched on the moonlit wall Thoth saw the horror lower its misshapen head
and take the scent like some hideous hound. Then the grisly head was thrown
back and the thing wheeled and was gone like a wind through the trees. The
Stygian flung up his arms in maddened exultation, and his teeth and eyes
gleamed in the moonlight.

A soldier on guard without the walls yelled in startled horror as a great
loping black shadow with flaming eyes cleared the wall and swept by him with
a swirling rush of wind. But it was gone so swiftly that the bewildered
warrior was left wondering whether it had been a dream or a
hallucination.

When the world was young and
men were weak, and the fiends of the night walked free,
I strove with Set by fire and steel and the juice of the upas-tree;
Now that I sleep in the mount's black heart, and the ages take their
toll,
Forget ye him who fought with the Snake to save the human
soul?

ALONE in the great sleeping-chamber with its high golden
dome King Conan slumbered and dreamed. Through swirling gray mists he heard a
curious call, faint and far, and though he did not understand it, it seemed
not within his power to ignore it. Sword in hand he went through the gray
mist, as a man might walk through clouds, and the voice grew more distinct as
he proceeded until he understood the word it spoke—it was his own name
that was being called across the gulfs of Space or Time.

Now the mists grew lighter and he saw that he was in a great dark corridor
that seemed to be cut in solid black stone. It was unlighted, but by some
magic he could see plainly. The floor, ceiling and walls were highly polished
and gleamed dull, and they were carved with the figures of ancient heroes and
half-forgotten gods. He shuddered to see the vast shadowy outlines of the
Nameless Old Ones, and he knew somehow that mortal feet had not traversed the
corridor for centuries.

He came upon a wide stair carved in the solid rock, and the sides of the
shaft were adorned with esoteric symbols so ancient and horrific that King
Conan's skin crawled. The steps were carven each with the abhorrent figure of
the Old Serpent, Set, so that at each step he planted his heel on the head of
the Snake, as it was intended from old times. But he was none the less at
ease for all that.

But the voice called him on, and at last, in darkness that would have been
impenetrable to his material eyes, he came into a strange crypt, and saw a
vague white-bearded figure sitting on a tomb. Conan's hair rose up and he
grasped his sword, but the figure spoke in sepulchral tones.

"Oh man, do you know me?"

"Not I, by Crom!" swore the king.

"Man," said the ancient, "I am Epemitreus."

"But Epemitreus the Sage has been dead for fifteen hundred years!"
stammered Conan.

"Harken!" spoke the other commandingly. "As a pebble cast into a dark lake
sends ripples to the further shores, happenings in the Unseen world have
broken like waves on my slumber. I have marked you well, Conan of Cimmeria,
and the stamp of mighty happenings and great deeds is upon you. But dooms are
loose in the land, against which your sword can not aid you."

"You speak in riddles," said Conan uneasily. "Let me see my foe and I'll
cleave his skull to the teeth."

"Loose your barbarian fury against your foes of flesh and blood," answered
the ancient. "It is not against men I must shield you. There are dark worlds
barely guessed by man, wherein formless monsters stalk—fiends which may
be drawn from the Outer Voids to take material shape and rend and devour at
the bidding of evil magicians. There is a serpent in your house, oh
king—an adder in your kingdom, come up from Stygia, with the dark
wisdom of the shadows in his murky soul. As a sleeping man dreams of the
serpent which crawls near him, I have felt the foul presence of Set's
neophyte. He is drunk with terrible power, and the blows he strikes at his
enemy may well bring down the kingdom. I have called you to me, to give you a
weapon against him and his hell-hound pack."

"But why?" bewilderedly asked Conan. "Men say you sleep in the black heart
of Golamira, whence you send forth your ghost on unseen wings to aid
Aquilonia in times of need, but I—I am an outlander and a
barbarian."

"Peace!" the ghostly tones reverberated through the great shadowy cavern.
"Your destiny is one with Aquilonia. Gigantic happenings are forming in the
web and the womb of Fate, and a blood-mad sorcerer shall not stand in the
path of imperial destiny. Ages ago Set coiled about the world like a python
about its prey. All my life, which was as the lives of three common men, I
fought him. I drove him into the shadows of the mysterious south, but in dark
Stygia men still worship him who to us is the arch-demon. As I fought Set, I
fight his worshippers and his votaries and his acolytes. Hold out your
sword."

Wondering, Conan did so, and on the great blade, close to the heavy silver
guard, the ancient traced with a bony finger a strange symbol that glowed
like white fire in the shadows. And on the instant crypt, tomb and ancient
vanished, and Conan, bewildered, sprang from his couch in the great
golden-domed chamber. And as he stood, bewildered at the strangeness of his
dream, he realized that he was gripping his sword in his hand. And his hair
prickled at the nape of his neck, for on the broad blade was carven a symbol
– the outline of a phoenix. And he remembered that on the tomb in the
crypt he had seen what he had thought to be a similar figure, carven of
stone. Now he wondered if it had been but a stone figure, and his skin
crawled at the strangeness of it all.

Then as he stood, a stealthy sound in the corridor outside brought him to
life, and without stopping to investigate, he began to don his armor; again
he was the barbarian, suspicious and alert as a gray wolf at bay.

What do I know of cultured
ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?
I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords
sing;
Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.
—The Road Of Kings

THROUGH the silence which shrouded the corridor of the royal
palace stole twenty furtive figures. Their stealthy feet, bare or cased in
soft leather, made no sound either on thick carpet or bare marble tile. The
torches which stood in niches along the halls gleamed red on dagger, sword
and keen-edged ax.

"Easy all!" hissed Ascalante. "Stop that cursed loud breathing, whoever it
is! The officer of the night-guard has removed most of the sentries from
these halls and made the rest drunk, but we must be careful, just the same.
Back! Here come the guard!"

They crowded back behind a cluster of carven pillars, and almost
immediately ten giants in black armor swung by at a measured pace. Their
faces showed doubt as they glanced at the officer who was leading them away
from their post of duty. This officer was rather pale; as the guard passed
the hiding-places of the conspirators, he was seen to wipe the sweat from his
brow with a shaky hand. He was young, and this betrayal of a king did not
come easy to him. He mentally cursed the vainglorious extravagance which had
put him in debt to the money-lenders and made him a pawn of scheming
politicians.

The guardsmen clanked by and disappeared up the corridor.

"Good!" grinned Ascalante. "Conan sleeps unguarded. Haste! If they catch
us killing him, we're undone—but few men will espouse the cause of a
dead king."

"Aye, haste!" cried Rinaldo, his blue eyes matching the gleam of the sword
he swung above his head. "My blade is thirsty! I hear the gathering of the
vultures! On!"

They hurried down the corridor with reckless speed and stopped before a
gilded door which bore the royal dragon symbol of Aquilonia.

"Gromel!" snapped Ascalante. "Break me this door open!"

The giant drew a deep breath and launched his mighty frame against the
panels, which groaned and bent at the impact. Again he crouched and plunged.
With a snapping of bolts and a rending crash of wood, the door splintered and
burst inward.

"In!" roared Ascalante, on fire with the spirit of the deed.

"In!" yelled Rinaldo. "Death to the tyrant!"

They stopped short. Conan faced them, not a naked man roused mazed and
unarmed out of deep sleep to be butchered like a sheep, but a barbarian wide-
awake and at bay, partly armored, and with his long sword in his hand.

"In, rogues!" yelled the outlaw. "He is one to twenty and he has no
helmet!"

True; there had been lack of time to don the heavy plumed casque, or to
lace in place the side-plates of the cuirass, nor was there now time to
snatch the great shield from the wall. Still, Conan was better protected than
any of his foes except Volmana and Gromel, who were in full armor.

The king glared, puzzled as to their identity. Ascalante he did not know;
he could not see through the closed vizors of the armored conspirators, and
Rinaldo had pulled his slouch cap down above his eyes. But there was no time
for surmise. With a yell that rang to the roof, the killers flooded into the
room, Gromel first. He came like a charging bull, head down, sword low for
the disembowelling thrust. Conan sprang to meet him, and all his tigerish
strength went into the arm that swung the sword. In a whistling arc the great
blade flashed through the air and crashed on the Bossonian's helmet. Blade
and casque shivered together and Gromel rolled lifeless on the floor. Conan
bounded back, still gripping the broken hilt.

"Gromel!" he spat, his eyes blazing in amazement, as the shattered helmet
disclosed the shattered head; then the rest of the pack were upon him. A
dagger point raked along his ribs between breastplate and backplate, a
sword-edge flashed before his eyes. He flung aside the dagger-wielder with
his left arm, and smashed his broken hilt like a cestus into the swordsman's
temple. The man's brains spattered in his face.

"Watch the door, five of you!" screamed Ascalante, dancing about the edge
of the singing steel whirlpool, for he feared that Conan might smash through
their midst and escape. The rogues drew back momentarily, as their leader
seized several and thrust them toward the single door, and in that brief
respite Conan leaped to the wall and tore therefrom an ancient battle-ax
which, untouched by time, had hung there for half a century.

With his back to the wall he faced the closing ring for a flashing
instant, then leaped into the thick of them. He was no defensive fighter;
even in the teeth of overwhelming odds he always carried the war to the
enemy. Any other man would have already died there, and Conan himself did not
hope to survive, but he did ferociously wish to inflict as much damage as he
could before he fell. His barbaric soul was ablaze, and the chants of old
heroes were singing in his ears.

As he sprang from the wall his ax dropped an outlaw with a severed
shoulder, and the terrible back-hand return crushed the skull of another.
Swords whined venomously about him, but death passed him by breathless
margins. The Cimmerian moved in, a blur of blinding speed. He was like a
tiger among baboons as he leaped, side-stepped and spun, offering an
ever-moving target, while his ax wove a shining wheel of death about him.

For a brief space the assassins crowded him fiercely, raining blows
blindly and hampered by their own numbers; then they gave back suddenly
– two corpses on the floor gave mute evidence of the king's fury,
though Conan himself was bleeding from wounds on arm, neck and legs.

"Knaves!" screamed Rinaldo, dashing off his feathered cap, his wild eyes
glaring. "Do ye shrink from the combat? Shall the despot live? Out on
it!"

He rushed in, hacking madly, but Conan, recognizing him, shattered his
sword with a short terrific chop and with a powerful push of his open hand
sent him reeling to the floor. The king took Ascalante's point in his left
arm, and the outlaw barely saved his life by ducking and springing backward
from the swinging ax. Again the wolves swirled in and Conan's ax sang and
crushed. A hairy rascal stooped beneath its stroke and dived at the king's
legs, but after wrestling for a brief instant at what seemed a solid iron
tower, glanced up in time to see the ax falling, but not in time to avoid it.
In the interim one of his comrades lifted a broadsword with both hands and
hewed through the king's left shoulder-plate, wounding the shoulder beneath.
In an instant Conan's cuirass was full of blood.

Volmana, flinging the attackers right and left in his savage impatience,
came plowing through and hacked murderously at Conan's unprotected head. The
king ducked deeply and the sword shaved off a lock of his black hair as it
whistled above him. Conan pivoted on his heel and struck in from the side.
The ax crunched through the steel cuirass and Volmana crumpled with his whole
left side caved in.

"Volmana!" gasped Conan breathlessly. "I'll know that dwarf in Hell!" He
straightened to meet the maddened rush of Rinaldo, who charged in wild and
wide open, armed only with a dagger. Conan leaped back, lifting his ax.

"Rinaldo!" his voice was strident with desperate urgency. "Back! I would
not slay you—"

"Die, tyrant!" screamed the mad minstrel, hurling himself headlong on the
king. Conan delayed the blow he was loth to deliver, until it was too late.
Only when he felt the bite of the steel in his unprotected side did he
strike, in a frenzy of blind desperation.

Rinaldo dropped with his skull shattered, and Conan reeled back against
the wall, blood spurting from between the fingers which gripped his
wound.

"In, now, and slay him!" yelled Ascalante.

Conan put his back against the wall and lifted his ax. He stood like an
image of the unconquerable primordial—legs braced far apart, head
thrust forward, one hand clutching the wall for support, the other gripping
the ax on high, with the great corded muscles standing out in iron ridges,
and his features frozen in a death snarl of fury—his eyes blazing
terribly through the mist of blood which veiled them. The men
faltered—wild, criminal and dissolute though they were, yet they came
of a breed men called civilized, with a civilized background; here was the
barbarian—the natural killer. They shrank back—the dying tiger
could still deal death.

Conan sensed their uncertainty and grinned mirthlessly and ferociously.
"Who dies first?" he mumbled through smashed and bloody lips.

Ascalante leaped like a wolf, halted almost in midair with incredible
quickness and fell prostrate to avoid the death which was hissing toward him.
He frantically whirled his feet out of the way and rolled clear as Conan
recovered from his missed blow and struck again. This time the ax sank inches
deep into the polished floor close to Ascalante's revolving legs.

Another misguided desperado chose this instant to charge, followed
half-heartedly by his fellows. He intended killing Conan before the Cimmerian
could wrench his ax from the floor, but his judgment was faulty. The red ax
lurched up and crashed down and a crimson caricature of a man catapulted back
against the legs of the attackers.

At that instant a fearful scream burst from the rogues at the door as a
black misshapen shadow fell across the wall. All but Ascalante wheeled at
that cry, and then, howling like dogs, they burst blindly through the door in
a raving, blaspheming mob, and scattered through the corridors in screaming
flight.

Ascalante did not look toward the door; he had eyes only for the wounded
king. He supposed that the noise of the fray had at last roused the palace,
and that the loyal guards were upon him, though even in that moment it seemed
strange that his hardened rogues should scream so terribly in their flight.
Conan did not look toward the door because he was watching the outlaw with
the burning eyes of a dying wolf. In this extremity Ascalante's cynical
philosophy did not desert him.

"All seems to be lost, particularly honor," he murmured. "However, the
king is dying on his feet—and—" Whatever other cogitation might
have passed through his mind is not to be known; for, leaving the sentence
uncompleted, he ran lightly at Conan just as the Cimmerian was perforce
employing his ax-arm to wipe the blood from his blinded eyes.

But even as he began his charge, there was a strange rushing in the air
and a heavy weight struck terrifically between his shoulders. He was dashed
headlong and great talons sank agonizingly in his flesh. Writhing desperately
beneath his attacker, he twisted his head about and stared into the face of
Nightmare and lunacy. Upon him crouched a great black thing which he knew was
born in no sane or human world. Its slavering black fangs were near his
throat and the glare of its yellow eyes shrivelled his limbs as a killing
wind shrivels young corn.

The hideousness of its face transcended mere bestiality. It might have
been the face of an ancient, evil mummy, quickened with demoniac life. In
those abhorrent features the outlaw's dilated eyes seemed to see, like a
shadow in the madness that enveloped him, a faint and terrible resemblance to
the slave Thoth-amon. Then Ascalante's cynical and all-sufficient philosophy
deserted him, and with a ghastly cry he gave up the ghost before those
slavering fangs touched him.

Conan, shaking the blood-drops from his eyes, stared frozen. At first he
thought it was a great black hound which stood above Ascalante's distorted
body; then as his sight cleared he saw that it was neither a hound nor a
baboon.

With a cry that was like an echo of Ascalante's death-shriek, he reeled
away from the wall and met the leaping horror with a cast of his ax that had
behind it all the desperate power of his electrified nerves. The flying
weapon glanced singing from the slanting skull it should have crushed, and
the king was hurled half-way across the chamber by the impact of the giant
body.

The slavering jaws closed on the arm Conan flung up to guard his throat,
but the monster made no effort to secure a death-grip. Over his mangled arm
it glared fiendishly into the king's eyes, in which there began to be
mirrored a likeness of the horror which stared from the dead eyes of
Ascalante. Conan felt his soul shrivel and begin to be drawn out of his body,
to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in
the formless chaos that was growing about him and engulfing all life and
sanity. Those eyes grew and became gigantic, and in them the Cimmerian
glimpsed the reality of all the abysmal and blasphemous horrors that lurk in
the outer darkness of formless voids and nighted gulfs. He opened his bloody
lips to shriek his hate and loathing, but only a dry rattle burst from his
throat.

But the horror that paralyzed and destroyed Ascalante roused in the
Cimmerian a frenzied fury akin to madness. With a volcanic wrench of his
whole body he plunged backward, heedless of the agony of his torn arm,
dragging the monster bodily with him. And his outflung hand struck something
his dazed fighting-brain recognized as the hilt of his broken sword.
Instinctively he gripped it and struck with all the power of nerve and thew,
as a man stabs with a dagger. The broken blade sank deep and Conan's arm was
released as the abhorrent mouth gaped as in agony. The king was hurled
violently aside, and lifting himself on one hand he saw, as one mazed, the
terrible convulsions of the monster from which thick blood was gushing
through the great wound his broken blade had torn. And as he watched, its
struggles ceased and it lay jerking spasmodically, staring upward with its
grisly dead eyes. Conan blinked and shook the blood from his own eyes; it
seemed to him that the thing was melting and disintegrating into a slimy
unstable mass.

Then a medley of voices reached his ears, and the room was thronged with
the finally roused people of the court—knights, peers, ladies, men-at-
arms, councillors—all babbling and shouting and getting in one
another's way. The Black Dragons were on hand, wild with rage, swearing and
ruffling, with their hands on their hilts and foreign oaths in their teeth.
Of the young officer of the door-guard nothing was seen, nor was he found
then or later, though earnestly sought after.

"The guard is here, you old fool!" cavalierly snapped Pallantides,
commander of the Black Dragons, forgetting Publius' rank in the stress of the
moment. "Best stop your caterwauling and aid us to bind the king's wounds.
He's like to bleed to death."

"Yes, yes!" cried Publius, who was a man of plans rather than action. "We
must bind his wounds. Send for every leech of the court! Oh, my lord, what a
black shame on the city! Are you entirely slain?"

"Wine!" gasped the king from the couch where they had laid him. They put a
goblet to his bloody lips and he drank like a man half dead of thirst.

"Good!" he grunted, falling back. "Slaying is cursed dry work."

They had stanched the flow of blood, and the innate vitality of the
barbarian was asserting itself.

"See first to the dagger-wound in my side," he bade the court
physicians.

"Rinaldo wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus."

"We should have hanged him long ago," gibbered Publius. "No good can come
of poets—who is this?"

He nervously touched Ascalante's body with his sandalled toe.

"By Mitra!" ejaculated the commander. "It is Ascalante, once count of
Thune! What devil's work brought him up from his desert haunts?"

"But why does he stare so?" whispered Publius, drawing away, his own eyes
wide and a peculiar prickling among the short hairs at the back of his fat
neck. The others fell silent as they gazed at the dead outlaw.

"Had you seen what he and I saw," growled the king, sitting up despite the
protests of the leeches, "you had not wondered. Blast your own gaze by
looking at—" He stopped short, his mouth gaping, his finger pointing
fruitlessly. Where the monster had died, only the bare floor met his
eyes.

"Crom!" he swore. "The thing's melted back into the foulness which bore
it!" "The king is delirious," whispered a noble. Conan heard and swore with
barbaric oaths.

"By Badb, Morrigan, Macha and Nemain!" he concluded wrathfully. "I am
sane! It was like a cross between a Stygian mummy and a baboon. It came
through the door, and Ascalante's rogues fled before it. It slew Ascalante,
who was about to run me through. Then it came upon me and I slew it—how
I know not, for my ax glanced from it as from a rack. But I think that the
Sage Epemitreus had a hand in it—"

"Hark how he names Epemitreus, dead for fifteen hundred years!" they
whispered to each other.

"By Ymir!" thundered the king. "This night I talked with Epemitreus! He
called to me in my dreams, and I walked down a black stone corridor carved
with old gods, to a stone stair on the steps of which were the outlines of
Set, until I came to a crypt, and a tomb with a phoenix carved on
it—"

"In Mitra's name, lord king, be silent!" It was the high-priest of Mitra
who cried out, and his countenance was ashen.

Conan threw up his head like a lion tossing back its mane, and his voice
was thick with the growl of the angry lion.

"Am I a slave, to shut my mouth at your command?"

"Nay, nay, my lord!" The high-priest was trembling, but not through fear
of the royal wrath. "I meant no offense." He bent his head close to the king
and spoke in a whisper that carried only to Conan's ears.

"My lord, this is a matter beyond human understanding. Only the inner
circle of the priestcraft know of the black stone corridor carved in the
black heart of Mount Golamira, by unknown hands, or of the phoenix-guarded
tomb where Epemitreus was laid to rest fifteen hundred years ago. And since
that time no living man has entered it, for his chosen priests, after placing
the Sage in the crypt, blocked up the outer entrance of the corridor so that
no man could find it, and today not even the high-priests know where it is.
Only by word of mouth, handed down by the high-priests to the chosen few, and
jealously guarded, does the inner circle of Mitra's acolytes know of the
resting-place of Epemitreus in the black heart of Golamira. It is one of the
Mysteries, on which Mitra's cult stands."

"I can not say by what magic Epemitreus brought me to him," answered
Conan. "But I talked with him, and he made a mark on my sword. Why that mark
made it deadly to demons, or what magic lay behind the mark, I know not; but
though the blade broke on Gromel's helmet, yet the fragment was long enough
to kill the horror."

Conan held out the broken weapon and the high-priest cried out and fell to
his knees.

"Mitra guard us against the powers of darkness!" he gasped. "The king has
indeed talked with Epemitreus this night! There on the sword—it is the
secret sign none might make but him—the emblem of the immortal phoenix
which broods for ever over his tomb! A candle, quick! Look again at the spot
where the king said the goblin died!"

It lay in the shade of a broken screen. They threw the screen aside and
bathed the floor in a flood of candle-light. And a shuddering silence fell
over the people as they looked. Then some fell on their knees calling on
Mitra, and some fled screaming from the chamber.

There on the floor where the monster had died, there lay, like a tangible
shadow, a broad dark stain that could not be washed out; the thing had left
its outline clearly etched in its blood, and that outline was of no being of
a sane and normal world. Grim and horrific it brooded there, like the shadow
cast by one of the apish gods that squat on the shadowy altars of dim temples
in the dark land of Stygia.